Field of Invention
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to semiconductor design technology, and more particularly, to a semiconductor apparatus allowing data input and output and a method of operating the same.
Description of Related Art
A NAND flash memory device may be operated using a multi level cell (MLC) method in which two bits of data are stored in a single memory cell or a triple level cell (TLC) method in which three bits of data are stored in a single memory cell. In an MLC NAND flash memory device, LSB data and MSB data are stored in a single memory cell. In a TLC NAND flash memory device, LSB data, CSB data, and MSB data are stored in a single memory cell.
In a NAND flash memory device, memory cells coupled to a word line may form a page, and a single physical page may be divided to multiple logical pages. For example, in a TLC NAND flash memory device, a single physical page may include an LSB page, a CSB page, and an MSB page.
To store multiple bits of data in a single memory cell, threshold voltage distributions of memory cells are to be divided at various levels based on data being stored. For example, in a TLC flash memory device, since three bits of data are stored in a single memory cell, threshold voltage distributions may be divided into eight levels. In this example, since the margin between the distributions decreases and the degree of integration increases, the amount of error bits caused by program interference may increase. However, data errors within a predetermined range may be corrected through error checking and correction (ECC) operation.
Although the error bits may be corrected by performing the ECC operation, an operation time required to perform a program loop to store data may be increased due to the ECC operation. In particular, in a data input operation using a TLC method, whenever an LSB program loop for storing LSB data, a CSB program loop for storing CSB data, and an MSB program loop for storing MSB data are performed, ECC operations are to be performed on the LSB data, the CSB data, and the MSB data, respectively, and thus the operation time may increase.